The Zhetysu District Court of Almaty completed hearings  on the claims of Imstalkon Joint-Stock Company and its head Mikhail Rezunov against Vremya Publishing House LLP, correspondent Mikhail Kazachkov, rehabilitation manager Yury Ponomarev and head of the public council of Unified National Pension Fund Evgeniy Seypulnik. The litigation was caused by three articles published in the "Vremya" newspaper: “No money, but be seated!” dated June 19, 2018, “Three-finger metal construction” dated June 12, 2018, “Love and discord” dated 24.06 .2018. The articles cover the theme of enterprises - debtors of the Unified Accumulative Pension Fund.

Plaintiffs challenge more than 16 abstracts of the articles. They demanded to declare the disputed abstracts  untrue, defamatory and causing harm to the honor, dignity and business reputation of the plaintiffs, to oblige the defendants to refute them, collect one million tenge in compensation for moral damage to M. Rezunov and delete the articles from the newspaper’s website.

The court hearings lasted for several months.

As the result after studying the materials of the case, upon hearing the parties, invited experts and a visiting philologist, the court satisfied the claims partially. The defendants must refute the information published in the three articles, pay 50 thousand tenge in compensation for moral harm to the head of the joint stock company and delete the controversial articles from the newspaper’s website. The editors intend to appeal this decision.

"Adil Soz" lawyer comments:

We believe that the announced court decision regarding the removal of articles from the website is illegal. Civil law does not contain such type of civil liability as the removal of controversial material from the Internet. A court conducts trial and makes decisions in strict accordance with the norms of current legislation. In  case of dissemination of information that contradicts the  reality, the legislator has defined the following forms of liability: publication of a refutation; publicaton of a free answer; recovery of monetary compensation for moral harm; compensation of losses caused to business reputation. And that's it! A court is not given the right to invent other forms of liability than those established by the law. Unfortunately, this is not the first case in this category of cases when courts rule to delete artiles. Besides, claims are brought against several phrases in the three newspaper articles. The court declared those phrases to be untrue. What were grounds for deleting the three articles completely? The court obliged the defendant to delete from the website the phrases that it did not declare untrue, that were not subject to the litigation, and no claims were filed against them. A court does not have the right to make rulings on information that was not subject to the court hearing.